The old Nahuatl twisted his head from side to side, testing the limits of his ability to move. Discovering that both knees could reach his chin, he managed to roll forward gently and get both feet beneath him. Then, Hummingbird stood up slowly and found the roof of the confined space less than a meter above his resting position. A bit cramped, but then I am not the largest of men.
He twisted one shoulder around to bring the sealing strip of the skinsuit within range of his lips and then spent a good fifteen minutes trying to catch the recessed plastic tab in his teeth. Finally, after relaxing all of the muscles in his neck, back, and arms individually, he was able to do so. When the tab popped free, the skinsuit puddled to the ground in a pool of gelatinlike oil, leaving only the neckring. With a two-millimeter clearance between his bonds and skin, the nauallis was able to shimmy free in another twenty minutes of hot, sweaty work in the closet.
As he worked, he felt a slow, steady sense of outrage building in his mind. A pity they couldn’t accept me as a fellow brother of the Order! Sra Osa will be most displeased by their shortsightedness. Protecting humanity from itself requires broader thinking.
Pulling the skinsuit back on was also a bit of work, but now he was fully awake and feeling quite limber. The compartment door was locked, but liquefying the suit had also deposited a number of tools from the gel matrix on the floor. He found them by feel, sorted them with deft fingers and then cut open the locking mechanism with a tiny plasma torch no longer than his little finger. Then he duck-walked out into one of the crew cabins and-thankfully-stood up.
As Hummingbird did so, the dissonance of his thought patterns concerning the crew of the Moulins finally caught his attention. An initial sensation of puzzlement was swiftly replaced by shock. I’ve been “pushed,” he realized. That “Old One” is stronger than I suspected. Disgusted, he spat on the floor of the empty room. I’ve made a deadly mistake in helping an Order ship come here. They are after the same prize as the Prince. Christ the Guardian curse them down through all nine hells!
Fifteen minutes later having recovered his clothing and z-suit, he padded onto the mess area and found the marines had been taken away. Worried, the old nauallis moved carefully through the rest of the little ship. Finally, he found the Imperials laid out on the floor of a cargo area above Engineering, trapped in their dead armor. Hummingbird squatted next to the squad leader with a pleasant smile. Something to salvage. We are all “friends” here… the Order hasn’t broken fully with the Empire yet. The marine glared back at him, sullen-eyed and gagged.
“ Go-cho Pequah,” the old Crow greeted him amiably, running practiced fingers down the desealer strip at the marine’s shoulder. The wrecked armor sighed; tension released from the gelcore, and it fell away in a limp pool of black oil and plexisteel laminate. The Iroquois flexed his fingers, toes, and then rolled up-clad only in his service skinsuit, his body stiff as lightning with restrained fury. The other four marines made angry, muttering sounds behind their gags.
“We’ve all been played dirty,” Hummingbird commented, peeling a flattened sleepytime capsule from Pequah’s neck. “And I appreciate your natural desire to eviscerate someone, but your first concern must be the Prince’s safety.”
Released, all five marines nodded slowly, grudgingly, as they flexed oxygen-deprived limbs. For a long moment the nauallis met their eyes in turn, then nodded, satisfied. “Leave the Europeans to me. The Prince has a tracker in his suit. Follow the repeaters until you find him and make sure he gets back here in one piece.”
Leaving the marines to scavenge for weapons and tools, Hummingbird slipped out into the dim, chaotic vastness of the landing bay. Packing foam lay scattered at the base of the landing cradle. He grimaced, seeing that the Order crewmen had brought, and assembled, a grav sled. Prepared, were they?
He ducked back inside the ship and returned moments later with a single-rider grav-ski. The device unfolded in swift, programmed motions. A bit of a smile shone in the old man’s face, remembering long summers wasted skidding around the alleys and avenues of Coyoacan with his classmates, a tight noisy pack of boys. Then the sense of fleeting time gripped him. He hopped on and grasped the controls.
“Go now.” He sped away with the wide flare of the running lights searching the enormous corridor ahead.
Hadeishi frowned, his jaw clenched tight as Cajeme’s voice burred in his earbug. Capsule lock is completely jammed-we’re having trouble cutting through without frying the nitto-hei inside-and there are four more capsules outside we can’t bring onboard until we’ve got these men out.
The Nisei officer’s eyes darted to the nav plot, which still showed the Tlemitl between them and the Khaid fleet-or what of the enemy they could see with their sensors greatly obscured by the Barrier, the radiation clouds from discharged weapons, and the sensor shadow of the broken dreadnaught. From his vantage, several Khaid destroyers were hanging off at a distance, but the rest of the enemy had disappeared.
“ Thai-i, do we have a remote we can run out to the edge of the wreck?”
Tocoztic shook his head in disgust. The Arawak’s beard was starting to grow in, which made him look particularly disreputable. “Nothing, kyo. We’ve got nothing useful aboard. I’d use an evac pod, but their maneuvering jets are exhausted once we get them into cargo one…” He gestured angrily at the plot. “Something is going on out there-I can pick up gravity-wave changes and some partial drive emission signatures-but we can’t see anything directly.”
Mitsuharu’s expression darkened further, considering the movements of the enemy. Out of sight is not out of my mind… that battle-cruiser’s drive emissions could easily be visible to these new-model battleships of theirs. This Spear does not carry the most advanced electronics quills can buy. Not like the… wait a moment.
“What about the Tlemitl? Are there any sensor booms or subsystems we can connect to and use?”
“The-” Tocoztic stopped himself, initial disbelief replaced by curiosity. “I don’t know, Chu-sa, but she hasn’t lost all power to systems-just her mains. One moment…”
Hadeishi swiveled his shockchair, feeling the carapace creak under him. All of the Command stations were now filled with crewmen from the pods they’d recovered initially. Cajeme and his engineers downdeck were busily shuffling off the newly recovered ratings and officers, which looked to swell the Kader ’s complement by another eighty or ninety bodies. Most of those recovered, however, had been injured to greater or lesser degree.
Now for the second act, he thought, gaze settling on Sho-i Lovelace at the Comm’s station, despite being-perhaps-the junior-most tech aboard. The ensign had tucked two spare console styli into her hair, which was bound up in a blond bun behind her head. The young woman’s expression was distant, all attention focused on sorting out the confusion of signals picked up by their sensor booms.
Hadeishi caught her eye. “ Sho-i? Are we still synched with the Khaid battlecast?”
“No, kyo. I’m getting intermittent bursts of traffic, but we’re out of the loop now.” She offered a crooked smile. “I’m sure they’ve figured out we’re no longer running with the surtu.”
“Very well. Route what you have to my earbug on sixty-three and-”
Lovelace started to nod in acknowledgment, then became quite still. “Wait one. Wait one.”
She stared at her console, gently adjusting the signal filtering, before scowling. “We’re picking up a rebroadcast, kyo. It’s the Khaid ’cast channel, but not from our immediate area. Routing to sixty-three.”
A babble of excited Khadesh flooded Mitsuharu’s hearing. The translator kicked in, but the hunt-lords were yowling so quickly, and overlapping one another, that the software produced only a garbled mess on the secondary channel.